Tickets: stalls/box € 5
by
Arthur Honegger
conductor
Kazushi Ono
director, set design, costume and light design
Romeo Castellucci
artistic collaborator
chorus master
dramaturg
Jeanne d'Arc Audrey Bonnet
Frère Dominique Sébastien Dutrieux
La Vierge Ilse Eerens
Marguerite Tineke Van Ingelgem
Catherine Aude Extrémo
Une Voix, Porcus, Héraut I, Le Clerc Jean-Noël Briend
Une Voix, Héraut II, Paysan Jérôme Varnier
Héraut III, L’Ane, Bedford, Jean de Luxembourg, Un paysan Louka Petit-Taborelli
L’Appariteur, Regnault de Chartres, Guillaume de Flavy, Perrot, Un prêtre Geoffrey Boissy
Soprano Solo Gwendoline Blondeel
Une Voix d’Enfant Siobhan Mathiak
.
led by
film director
Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes
One of the most celebrated figures of European theatre, Romeo Castellucci directs Arthur Honegger and librettist Paul Claudel’s extraordinary 1935 “dramatic oratorio”. The great modernist work recounts the life of the heroine in eleven scenes, starting with the last moments of her torment: a journey backwards in time through the memories of her sentence to death and her calling in childhood. In this staging, the narrative is free of symbolism, hagiography and nostalgic portrayals of history and the celestial heroine. Castellucci almost literally lays bare the protagonist, peeling back the layers of skin to reveal this human being in all her nudity. Actors and singers will realise a kaleidoscope of memories and emotions (the extraordinary Audrey Bonnet plays the protagonist), together with the choir and large orchestra featuring pianos, saxophones, and one of the first electronic instruments, the ondes Martenot. The contemporary music, spiritual chorals, contemporary influences and jazz fuse in a musical mix which glorifies the musicality of the verses. While the opera as a whole resembles a Greek tragedy, the orchestra evokes the optimism and future hopes of the years between the two wars. The music, made from layers of memory, is a door leading to an interior journey.